AECbytes Celebrates its Fourth Anniversary!

This month marks the completion of AECbytes' 4th year in existence. What was once a fledging publication that broadcast its first issue on December 9, 2003 to 300 subscribers has now grown to an established entity in the AEC field, with over 6000 registered subscribers, all of which are strictly opt-in only, signing up themselves through the AECbytes subscription form. In addition, the website currently welcomes close to 50,000 unique visitors a month, who find it through searching for relevant content and through links posted on various other sites. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the readers for their continued interest, to all the advertisers for their generous support, and to various other online publications who continue to post links to AECbytes content. Many thanks to all of you!

AECbytes starts this month with a Viewpoint contribution from Tammy McCuen and Major Patrick Suermann, P.E., two academics who are closely involved with the National Building Information Modeling Standard (NBIMS) effort. In their article entitled "The Interactive Capability Maturity Model and 2007 AIA TAP BIM Award Winners," they discuss the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) that is being developed as part of the NBIMS to become a tool for BIM users to evaluate their practices and processes, and for portfolio-wide analysis to establish an organization’s current strategic or operational BIM implementation.  They also describe a joint project between the AIA and NBIMS in which an interactive version of the CMM was applied to each of the 2007 TAP BIM award winners in order to test the model against real-world BIM projects.

This will be followed by reports on the AIA TAP conference and Autodesk University, both of which were held earlier this month. Also on the agenda for this month is a feature article on tracking submittals electonically, and two new Tips and Tricks articles that some somewhat whimsical and quite non-traditional, one on designing with the Golden Rectangle in AutoCAD and the other on creating mosaic patterns in Google SketchUp.

Wishing you all a very festive holiday season and a wonderful New Year!

Thank you!

Lachmi Khemlani

Editorials > December 2007